Identity Research in Higher Education: Commonalities, Differences, and Complementarities

Abstract

The role of identity in higher education research exists in a paradoxical intellectual space. On the one hand, the very notion of identity means, as its Latin root idem betrays, being the same; on the other hand, the concept of identity has become, practically, ideologically, and intellectually, a political notion that posits difference as much as uniformity ( Gergen, 1991 ). Modern notions of identity thus have the paradoxical nature of both being a property of a self, and a property given to a self based on association with others.